Dec 8, 2013

Africa High-Tech: Christopher Kirkley

In 2008, Christopher Kirkley went to Africa in hopes of
capturing sounds rarely heard by the rest of the world. Traveling
southwest from Morocco, carrying little more than a backpack, an
acoustic guitar and a digital recorder, the shaven-headed Portland
native, then in his late 20s, recorded every form of regional music he
encountered, from urban dance bands to nomadic Tuareg singers. As he
pushed into the Sahara, though, a trend developed. At night, Kirkley
would frequently sit around a fire, drinking tea with other young
musicians. He’d strum a tune for the locals, then hand the guitar over
and ask them to show him a song from their own culture. Often, they’d
put the instrument aside, pull out a cellphone, and play him a tinny
MP3—usually by an artist they couldn’t identify, and featuring elements
of Western-style production, such as drum machines and Auto-Tuned
vocals.

But as he continued
to explore the Sahel—a vast geographic belt covering parts of Senegal,
Mali, Mauritania and Niger—Kirkley began to hear many of those same
songs emanating from phones all over the region. It soon dawned on him
that he had stumbled upon precisely what he’d come to Africa to find: a
rich, self-contained, largely undiscovered musical tradition. Only,
instead of an old, possibly fading tradition like he expected, he’d come
across a new, wholly modern one.

While other
technological advancements, such as personal computers, have been slow
to arrive in West Africa, cellphones, specifically of the cheap,
off-brand variety, are even more integral to everyday life than they are
in America, Kirkley observed, functioning less as communication devices
than as pocket-size storage units containing photos, videos and,
especially, eclectic music libraries. As in other parts of the world,
the digital music collections of those living in the Sahara are built
primarily through file sharing, except instead of taking place
anonymously in cyberspace, the exchange happens face-to-face via
Bluetooth. In a region without reliable Internet connections, the people
there had, inadvertently, created a kind of ambulatory, regionalized
peer-to-peer network. “Instead of fiber-optic cables,” Kirkley says,
“you have highways, and people on buses with phones.”

Five years later,
Kirkley, 32, is an internationally recognized authority, not just on
contemporary African pop but on the role of cellphones in West African
society. Since returning to the United States in 2010, he’s put together
two compilations of songs copied from SD cards during the year he spent
in Mali. Initially available only as a cassette and through his blog,
the online popularity of Music From Saharan Cellphones—wildly
divergent mixes showcasing everything from Malian hip-hop to Mauritanian
synth music—inspired Kirkley to start a label, Sahelsounds, through
which he’s released several more albums of rare African music. He’s been
interviewed by the Guardian and the BBC, and gave presentations at the Time Based Arts Festival and the WW-sponsored
Portland Digital eXperience. Recently he flew to France to speak at a
tech conference in Paris. He’s even been contacted by phone companies
looking for advice on opening up the Saharan market. And all for
uncovering a thoroughly offline culture and bringing it online.

“It’s crazy how things happen on the Internet,” he says.

For his first four
months in Africa, Kirkley lived in Nouakchott, the capital of
Mauritania, where he recorded primarily vaguely bluesy, amplified
wedding bands. It wasn’t until he got to Kidal, in northern Mali, that
Kirkley became aware of the crucial role cellphones play in
disseminating a broad variety of music throughout the Sahel. A small,
dusty border town miles from the nearest paved road, Kidal’s proximity
to both Algeria and Niger nonetheless makes it a well-traveled “desert
port” of sorts. As such, the phones in Kidal offer especially dynamic
surveys of West African popular music, the result of MP3 trading between
the local population and the truckers, drug smugglers and sub-Saharan
migrants passing through on their way elsewhere. Along with outdated
rock and pop hits from the United States and Europe, the collections
Kirkley gained access to ran a spectacularly wide gamut, from the Ivory
Coast’s stuttering dance genre coupé décalé to electronic updates of the Algerian folk style of raï to the entrancing, psychedelic assouf music made globally popular by Mali’s own Tinariwen.

Kirkley was
especially drawn to music born seemingly from odd cross-cultural
exchanges, such as that of Mdou Moctar, a guitarist from Niger whose
self-recordings feature the prominent use of Auto-Tune. But as Kirkley
explains, “He wasn’t, like, this Tuareg kid who heard T-Pain.” Rather,
he went to Nigeria and became exposed to the country’s
Bollywood-obsessed film industry, in which producers utilize
pitch-correcting technology in an attempt to mimic Indian movie
soundtracks. So Moctar is, in fact, a kid filtering Tuareg guitar
through Indian-influenced Nigerian film music with distant, unintended
echoes of current American pop radio. “It’s a very weird web,” Kirkley
says.

Of course, the image
of a white man going into Africa and emerging with a trove of
uncopyrighted music carries some negative connotations, and Kirkley’s
had to deal with them from the moment he made his first compilation
available for download. A few blogs misreported that Kirkley had
scavenged the songs from discarded SD cards. In truth, he traded for
them directly, usually in exchange for a Townes Van Zandt or Elliott
Smith album. And when he decided to press Music From Saharan Cellphones
to vinyl and sell it, Kirkley burned through international phone cards
trying to track down each artist and sign them to a contract, agreeing
to split the revenues evenly. Besides, just because the musicians come
from impoverished countries doesn’t mean they lack business sense. After
all, they’re the ones who took the technology available to them and
turned it into a distribution model, which some have used to build
lucrative touring careers. Some even turned down Kirkley’s contract
offer, considering the money too paltry. In a way, Kirkley says, the
artists of the Sahel understand the current music economy better than a
lot of record executives do.

“Music wasn’t always a
recorded thing that was commercialized,” he says. “Recorded music is
pretty new in the history of music. So it’s not like music is going to
stop being made. It was made before there were commercial recordings,
and it’ll be made after. And I think these kids are more on top of it
than people are here.”

But
the phenomenon Kirkley observed may have been a fleeting one. In the
five years since he first visited the Sahara, things are already
starting to change. On return visits to the region, Kirkley found
Internet speeds, once grindingly slow, gradually improving, along with
the speed of culture: Formerly enthralled by the likes of the Scorpions
and Dire Straits, people in West Africa are catching on to au courant
pop stars almost as soon as they break here. Even though he knows
firsthand the way the Web can transform lives, Kirkley regards the
encroachment of the Internet in the Sahel—with its tendency to absorb
everything it touches into a homogenous monoculture—with trepidation.

“The whole landscape
is going to change drastically,” he says. “The idea of this closed
network—once Internet speeds are quick enough to allow uploading songs,
and kids can make their own websites and have their own version of
SoundCloud, it’ll change everything. So the Internet’s coming there.
It’s just taking its time.”

Disclaimer

Some posts have download ("get it") links. Check out the comments!!!

"Get it" links on this blog are not hosted on my own servers but were collected from another sites, therefore, if the "get it" link is not available anymore, don't ask me for uploading it again. I'm not gonna do it!

The music is generally out-of-print or otherwise difficult to obtain on the open market. It is posted here out of love and respect for the music and the artists!Moreover, download links are not available for albums which are recently published, I just add links to albums of some old tunes which are not available anymore at official sellers.

Anyway, if you like the albums please support the artist by buying the original CD or vinyl. Your are strongly encouraged to support the musicians! If your music is posted on this blog and you would like it removed please email: